If there is one artist in the world who is identified with a medium, it’s Cai Guo-Qiang and gunpowder. Over the years, he has used it to draw (on canvas as well as in the sky), for performance as well as conceptual art. He’s even used it for pretty standard - if grandiose - fireworks shows.

Sky Ladder uses the story of him accomplishing a lifelong dream to create a sky ladder - inspired by a Christian tradition of a stairway to heaven (also a 1970s rock anthem). With that story working largely as the bookends, the movie explores his early life prior to and during the Cultural Revolution in China. His father had made their home a centre for artistic discussion as well as himself being a successful painter. Relatively early in his career, Cai moved to Japan and then further afield, especially now that he has become an international art star. 

The movie touches on themes such as the influence of traditional Chinese art on his work, his connection with his father and grandmother - both of whom were still alive if very frail at the time of filming, the ethics of working on projects sponsored by the Chinese government such as fireworks at the Beijing Olympics and 2014 APEC conference. Another interesting theme is how to keep your art fresh when the struggle to make it is over - he now has access to significant resources to carry out projects but seeks out obscure artists integrate to integrate their ideas and energy. Visiting one such obscure artist, he comments that ‘compulsive and sincere emotion that should exist in all art’ - in some way that sums up his quest, in some ways harder now that he can easily access financial investment in his artwork.

The highpoint of the movie is definitely the creation of his Sky Ladder at a Chinese fishing village near his family’s ancestral home. It is a thing of wonder and beauty to behold before for the few minutes of its life, stretching 500 metres into the sky just before dawn breaks. The long and quixotic journey to carry out his dream came true. He dedicated the work to his grandmother who would die a month later. Making the project even more challenging was the fact that he hid it from government authorities. The third attempt - England, the United States and then China - finally succeeded.

While the sky ladder theme holds the film together, the abundance of other themes left me wanting for more than soundbites. Although the arc of his career was drawn, I really wanted to hear him speak about his work more in-depth and explain what he has been trying to say through his gunpowder and other works. While there are many times he talks about his life, I really didn’t hear enough about his very original art.

Shepard Fairey rose to public fame and consciousness with his Obama ‘Hope’ poster leading up to the 2008 American presidential election. Obey Giant tells the story of Fairey’s road to fame and celebrity with the Obama poster being the tipping point.

A non-academically inclined high school student, he finally came into his own by studying art. Even at art school, subversion of political posters started in a big way by him posting the face of Andre the Giant over a mayoral candidate’s face on a billboard as part of a class assignment. 

Andre the Giant was certainly his main obsession and vehicle for many years, eventually he incorporated the words ‘Obey Giant’ into the imagery to become his artistic trademark. Behind this obsession was the anti-mainstream questioning of ownership of the public space - by government and corporations through advertising - or by other voices. Street art was not just a vandalism game for him. 

And so he went about his underground activities of posting decals based on Andre the Giant and postering. He came out from the street art underground with the Obama poster. Creating that poster was a conscious decision to take part in partisan politics rather than just railing against the 'system' and it redirected his career. He felt he could no longer stand on the sidelines and criticize. He needed to stand up for what he believed in. The poster was not commissioned, the Obama campaign never brought him on board and he let anyone use it - foregoing any financial benefit.

This career changing decision led him in directions that the documentary follows, and it continues to play out until the present. The portrait became iconic and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. The documentary follows the upward and downward directions his career took. As a result of of his Obama portrait, he had his first major gallery show in Boston, where on opening night he was arrested because of some of the graffiti works he had been doing in the city while there. He was accused of damaging public property. A spirit-crushing legal journey lasted many months. Then the more complicated case came up with Associated Press suing him for using one of their pictures as the source for his Obama portrait, which had the potential to bankrupt him even though he never benefited financially. Again, months of legal hell ensued before AP finally dropping the case.

At this point of his career, his exploration of ownership of the public space evolved. He was now famous and generating significant revenue through his work. he was commissioned to paint murals. He became involved in partisan politics and progressive positions, especially in the Trump era. His aesthetic has evolved, with posters and murals that have taken his Obama look into something much more based on a design look, which was already an element of his work, but is now more present as part of the more polished look of his work.

Following the completion of this documentary, he has definitely chosen to move away from his counter-cultural vibe - he recently opened up an Obey Giant clothing store on the Champs Elysées in Paris. His work has become more beautiful than edgy.

Obey Giant’s strength is its exploration of the street art scene and its existential questioning of ownership of the public space. Given the superstar reality of Fairey today, it also covers his development and initial inspirations, which have continued into his current work. At a visceral level. the documentary delivers an understanding of the risks street artists take. Fairey describes his arrests, which have involved police violence but also included the refusal to give him access to his medication for type 1 diabetes - his health and even his life were at risk because of the arrests. So being a street artist had real and significant consequences for him, even leaving aside the court cases brought against him.

It is interesting to contrast Fairey’s career with Banksy’s, probably the world’s two best known street artists. Banksy has continued to stay outside and flaunt the artistic and political system - even while those systems try to take possession of his work. He has consistently kept his critiques at a meta level, certainly with regards to politics. Fairey chose to become involved in partisan politics and issues about which he is passionate. Both valid choices. But I feel that over the years, Fairey’s art has weakened. Audience taste now matters to him.

The Mystery of Picasso lets the art do the talking. I had my doubts about it given it was filmed in 1956, but it’s actually the clearest view into the creative process of an artist I have seen to date, almost entirely without words. Unfortunately, the music, like the title, feels poorly chosen and detracts from the viewing experience.

The first part is a series of quick marker and ink drawings. The filmmaker developed a technique showing the drawing developing in real time. Picasso sat and drew on one side of a special cloth and the camera was on the other side, registering every mark he made. The drawings become repetitive but certainly offer a quick first glimpse into his artistic process. The best ones are the most abstract, black lines and circles filling the page, coming alive to acquire depth and vibrancy.

The breathtaking section followed the development of three paintings, with images taken every few minutes. The first is the head of a goat. Starting from a simple, loose line drawing, he worked until it took on an expressive life of its own. What’s most interesting is to see how much he reworked the painting - every single part of it going from light to dark and sometimes back to light, detail to non-detailed, colours changing throughout as well. He was experimenting throughout. The final product is a stunner and in this case, he actually says off camera that it took five hours. It was a jaw-dropper to understand just how much he worked every square inch of the canvas. I assumed that the most famous painter of the twentieth century would know what he wanted when he started a painting and simply carried it out. Given his work appears so loose and quick, I did not think he needed so much trial and error - obviously a false assumption.

The shock only grew with the next painting, a nude woman reading. In this case, the process is even more dramatic, at a certain point he scrapes away all his work and starts over again. In this case, the face was where almost all the effort was concentrated. Seeing the changes and the various moods expressed by each iteration was amazing. At the same time, other parts retained the looseness of the initial sketch. At the final stage, he integrated collaged papers into the painting.

The final painting is an inspiration for all struggling artists. It’s a collection of vignettes of beach scenes - waterskiing, houses, people standing. In this case he worked every single section over and over and over again. One of the central figures is a woman, who never stops changing size and gesture. In this case, even the genius overworked his piece, eventually saying off camera that it’s really going badly and he wants to start over. He does and the final finished painting is much more in line with his later work - people who look similar to Henry Moore sculptures. He should have stopped halfway through the initial version as it was amazing, but he didn’t. He was searching for more and risked failure to achieve it. So the takeaway for me is that risk and failure are part of the artistic process as well.

My conclusion is that Picasso’s process was to go down a path and express his visual idea according to his style - but he didn’t stop there. He went further, pushing his style to greater individual expression through trial, error and experimentation.

The sad note of the film is that all the work he created during the filming was destroyed - the only record of it is in the film. Too bad, I would have happily taken those pieces for myself given the chance.

Pina, 2011, is a unique artist biography in that the artist is absent - she died suddenly, a week before shooting was scheduled to begin. In the hands of supremely talented director, Wim Wenders, this death and grief of her dance company members becomes a reference point in some unexpected ways.

Pina Bausch was a modern dance leader. An early quote refers to dance as a language that has to be learned. This applies for her dancers but also for audiences. As an audience member with no interest in dance, this movie was a challenge for me. It remains a language I don’t speak, although I have learned a few words by watching this movie. 

To handle the absence of the central character, Wenders surprisingly uses little existing film footage of Pina, but rather many portrait shots of the dancers looking at the camera with a voice over of their stories and comments about Pina. Very effective emotionally, but when talking about her and her dance philosophy - I’m still unable to speak the language or even learn much about it.

On a more positive front, the movie shows significant excerpts of performances. The ones I enjoyed the most are actually the vignettes of dancers in non-studio or non-theatre settings, including sidewalks, forests, even beside a swimming pool. My favourite is a man on the street dancing while a small dog yaps at his feet the whole time. That integration of dance into modern life and settings did feel appropriate.

The themes of the her longer pieces revolve around the tension between the sexes and a blinding yearning, usually for some sort of connection with others. Apparently that was one of her constant questions to her dancers: "What are you longing for", to which they needed to respond through dance. 

Where she stands out in the world of modern dance is in bringing a strong theatrical element into her performances. Where this outweighs the overbearing conceptual aspects of some of her work, such as Cafe Mueller, I can see myself sitting through a performance. For those highly conceptual pieces, it would be really difficult for me to stay connected for any extended period.

The only performance I really enjoyed was Full Moon. All the themes of her work are there, but this one is filled with joy rather than angst. The physical, high energy approach of her dancers combines well with the subject matter.

By watching Pina I learned more about modern dance, something of very little interest to me. But the unique situation Wenders found himself in and his solution to the sudden absence of the film's main subject do create a memorable film, filled with raw sorrow. But precisely that closeness to her death created an overly eulogistic final product.

Finding Vivian Maier, 2014, is a study of the life of someone who has become one of the key figures in street photography - despite not publishing a single photo during her life. The documentary is not aimed primarily at showing her stunning work, but delving into the mystery of her life. A noble aim, but for someone so determined to keep the doors of her life closed, it’s an effort that can only partially succeed, as this movie does on that front.

Maier worked as a nanny, mostly in Chicago, from the 1950s to the 1990s. During that time, she shot an estimated 150,000 photos - a staggering number. She was only discovered as a fluke by the film’s producer and narrator. Maier was never interviewed for the movie as she died in 2009 before work on the film started.

The fundamental mystery is how this woman who fled any type of intimacy with anyone - family, those for whom she worked, friends - was able to connect with people on the streets she photographed. In books and the unfortunate very small photo selection on the DVD, you see how she could elicit the most remarkable expressions and humanity in her subjects. At the same time, her photos have a breathtaking composition and capture moments in remarkable ways. Clearly an exceptional talent but also a compulsion to take that many photographs.

I would have preferred seeing more of her work and her progression over the years. The best we get is examples throughout the film with minimal or no reference to when the photo was taken. Some of the photos are of children she nannied. Now adults, they are the main subject of the interviews in the movie and have the most insightful stories. Frequently, they were marched around town, including downtrodden sections, so that she could take photos. 

Even with these interviews, we never completely grasp the connection between the artist and her work. While difficult in the case of most artists, perhaps this is one of the more extreme and enigmatic cases. Nevertheless, we don’t need to know the interior life, motivations and reasons of an artist to appreciate her work. So why bother trying so hard as this movie does? Make the connection if you can, but look at the work, analyze it, see how it evolves and ultimately admire it and appreciate it. 

Finding Vivian Maier shows us a talented, mysterious person. We won’t be able to understand her. We can understand her art, something this documentary should have made a better effort to do.  

Exit Through the Gift Shop, 2010, is everything the famous, anonymous, street artist Banksy is - iconoclastic, funny, mocking, ambiguous and likely other things I am missing. There are so many readings of this documentary and the ambiguity and irony only grows as the movie continues. It’s feels like he’s repeating - Do you think I really meant that? I can see the expression on his face, but given nobody knows who he is, so I guess there’s something wrong with my picture. The prank never ends.

The story starts with the transformation of a Banksy super-fan Thierry Gietta into a world famous artist over the course of a few weeks. After the fact, I remember seeing his work in a Toronto Yorkville gallery selling for $30,000. Are you kidding me? 

This documentary was an introduction into graffiti and street art, something I had not thought too much about, but for which I have been increasing in appreciation over time. Seeing how vandalism has now evolved into fine art world through the case study of Banksy is certainly a hugely humorous elements of the story. He went from being chased by police to having his work sold at top world auctions for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Quite the journey.

The narrative glue of the story is compulsive videographer Thierry who goes from fanboy to participant and chronicler of street artists both in France and L.A. where he runs a clothing business. The genesis of the video is his stockpile of videos of him following street artists. Eventually, he was given an intro to Banksy and started filming a documentary on him, but was utterly incapable of editing it into something that made sense. So Banksy took over. The narrative flipped from Banksy to Thierry as the main character. The story now followed how Thierry morphed into Mr. Brainwash (MBW) - a street artist with celebrity rather than street cred.

MBW launched his career with an official Banksy endorsement, which made his inaugural show in L.A. a smashing success, leading to unbelievable commissions, such as designing a Madonna album cover image. Yet, by the end of the movie, Banksy indicates that he regrets encouraging the career of MBW. Adding to the irony of the situation, it’s unclear if MBW is aware of this slag Thierry’s art career. Just what Thierry understands of his situation appears limited. He carries on with his street art inspired work with a feel-good vibe that is completely contrary to his hero, while aping his style. There have even been suggestions that Thierry’s art career is a prank created by Banksy - which he denies.

Exit Through the Gift Store provides a great introduction and insight into Banksy and his art, stunts, pranks and practice. It’s an epic journey to see someone who started out as a vandal now continuing to offer biting and funny social criticism. How much of it is genuine and how much is he messing with our heads is something we may never fully know

What makes the documentary unique is the Thierry narrative - a mid-stream role reversal between subject and filmmaker. 

Engaging, funny, informative and ambiguous. A great introduction into the very public hidden life of Banksy.